Democratic New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s handpicked City Council speaker was arrested for blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge while participating in a union-organized Occupy Wall Street protest.

The incident occurred a little more than two years before de Blasio railed against the “immoral” and “not mature” actions of New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s aides in conducting a disruptive “traffic study” on the George Washington Bridge for apparently political reasons.

Melissa Mark-Viverito, who became Council speaker last week after de Blasio and his aides lobbied Council members on her behalf, was arrested on November 17, 2011 while sitting with a group on the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge chanting “We are the 99 percent” and “All day! All week! Occupy Wall Street!”

Mark-Viverito, an eighth-district City councilwoman, and her group only remained in their position for a “few minutes” before they were arrested, but Mark-Viverito noted that “we probably would have been there you know 16, 17 hours.” SEIU 1199 president George Gresham was also part of the group.

“I was more than happy to participate in this action,” Mark-Viverito said after spending approximately five hours in jail.

The protest was part of a nationwide effort by unions and others to block bridges on November 17 in various cities.

Christie burned a lot of bridges in that debate, and in his embrace (literally) of Obama in those final days of the 2012 election. Ironically, it’s the Obama administration that is widening its probe into the use of those funds now. Don’t expect too many Republicans to rush to Christie’s side in this fight, except to point out that the $2.2 million difference between the two advertising campaign proposals amounts to 0.041% of the porkfest Barack Obama and Chris Christie demanded from Congress for Sandy relief. There may be a lot of reasons why victims haven’t seen their Sandy aid yet, but this ad campaign isn’t one of them.

George H.W. Bush tried to make nice with Democrats in 1990 by giving in to a tax increase, only to have Bill Clinton(!) call him a liar and use Bush’s rhetoric successfully against him during the 1992 campaign:

John McCain spent virtually his entire career in politics playing the role of iconoclastic “Maverick,” which meant frequently siding with Democrats and pulling the rug out from Republicans, only to discover in 2008 that at election time, the media wing of the Democrat party plays hardball, for keeps, and in the midst of fullblown hopenchange fever cheerfully devoured his presidential campaign in 2008 without batting an eye. Similarly, Chris Christie has all too often as governor of New Jersey embraced Obama and offered very few coattails to his fellow Republicans, particularly when it mattered in the fall of 2012 during the Romney campaign. He too is in the process of having his presidential hopes devoured by the medialeft.

Charlie Brown never learned that Lucy will always pull the football away; why don’t Republicans ever learn that however much they cozy up to the left, they will eventually be fatally stung. It is the nature of the scorpion.

The difference between Bane and de Blasio is that Bane actually believed that drivel he spouted. He never colluded with rich donors to kick horses to the curb so his backers could snap up prime Gotham real estate on the cheap.

The schadenfreude here for those irked at Christie's action in the run-up to the 2012 election is it was his embrace of Obama over attempting to squeeze more Sandy relief funds out of the feds that truly enraged people on the right who already weren't all that happy with the governor's self-serving actions at the RNC Convention. So to have Obama's Justice Department probing Christie over the money Christie begged for from Obama is a fitting coda to any notion the governor had that throwing Mitt Romney under the bus was a no-lose proposition for himself.

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